The corporeality of sound: drag performance, lip-synching and the popular critique of gendered theatrics in Australian film and television

This article investigates the representation of male and trans drag performance in Australian film to interrogate drag’s continuing potential for gender subversion. We argue that while drag has become mundane through repetition and recognisability, attention to the disjuncture between the visual and the sound (or lip-synching’s non-sound) in drag opens new possibilities for film depictions to disrupt gender norms. We begin with an account of how lip-synching provides new critical ways to think about drag, identity and gender performativity, and then analyse how three Australian films represent drag performance in the context of sound. By showing how drag frames performance through layers of sound emanating from different corporeal sources (the body, the recording), we argue that contemporary drag subverts the cultural demand for the seamlessness of vocal sound and visual embodiment for authentic gender identity, thereby pointing to the precarity of gender normativity.

Gender Subversion in Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn

This study examines the various representations of female identity in Murdoch’s The Unicorn. The analysis of the novel revolves around the character of Hannah who is the center of everyone’s obsessive gaze. She is described both as an angel and a monster, a victim and a victimizer. Her victimization is aggravated by her passive submission to the will of her victimizers. This simultaneous presence of contradictory features in one character problematizes the notion of perceiving female identity in terms of binaries. As a typical Gothic heroine, Hannah is trapped within cultural assumptions about women. She passively and yet subversively plays the roles projected on her by the contradictory desires of other characters. It will be argued that the obsessive pursuit of perfection in a female figure as well as the disruption of the boundaries of victim and victimizer in this novel serve to problematize the cultural tendency to understand individuals in terms of stereotypes. Therefore, this study aims to illustrate how Murdoch has used an enigmatic female character to challenge the readers’ disposition to perceive characters in terms of gender stereotypes.

When girls draw the sword: Dansō, cross-dressing and gender subversion in Japanese shōjo manga

This article focuses on the representation of FtM cross-dresser characters in Japanese shōjo manga and their gender performances. The first cross-dresser heroine in manga is Sapphire, the main character from 1953s Ribon no kishi. Following this first example, similar characters have continued to appear in shōjo manga, obtaining very positive responses from the audience. While they are seen as rebellious characters challenging stereotypical views on gender in the Japanese society, the narratives where they appear do not always fully explore this aspect. The aim of this article is to investigate the role of cross-dresser heroines in manga as a tool to reinforce the sociocultural patriarchal status quo and as a different gender embodiment outside stereotyped femininity. It argues that the possibility for those characters to occupy powerful positions and succeed is related to masculinity, symbolized by the sword, stressing how ultimately their revolutionary potential is weakened and limited.

Gender Subversion: A Cultural Reconsideration through a Fairy Tale

The following paper tries to socially understand gender norms and the possibility of subversion of the recommended roles. Judith Butlers (1990) Performative theory of gender acts, discussed probability of gender subversion in various societal conceptualizations of gender. The undertaken study, through thematic analysis, investigated particular characters in a fairy tale, The land of stories: Beyond the kingdom (2015). It was found that gender was a social construct, and it existed due to repeated and accepted socially ascribed practices. The characters reconsidered gender through subversion by breaching the expected traditional societal gender norms. Though, for the intelligibility, these reconsidered gender roles needed recurrence. The findings also seemed to assert that the subversive acts could be shocking and unacceptable, but, they do not possess the potential to terminate the established gender norms, rather, just assist the characters to meet their ends, towards fresh identities and roles in the extensive societal dominion.

Exploring gender subversion and recuperation in anal fisting among gay men

Anal fisting among gay men, that is, the sexual(ised) and erotic (single or partnered) practice of inserting the hand(s) and/or forearm(s) into the anus and rectum, has historically been framed in medical and medico-forensic case studies as a violent and dangerous sexual practice associated with the contraction of disease, heightened risk of sexual injury, and the possibility of death. In contrast to this, pro-Queer scholars of gender and sexuality have conceptually reframed the act of anal fisting among gay men as a subversive sexual practice which in its discursive and material performances radically transgresses the heteronormative tropes which typically underwrite human sex/uality, especially in ways that render the preferred representations of (gay) sex as ‘vanilla’. By drawing from unstructured individual interviews with a sample of eight (self-identifying) South African gay men who regularly incorporate anal fisting into their sexual relations, this study explores the gendered contradictions which rhetorically circumscribe how these men discursively construct and experience the corpo-erotic practice of anal fisting. In doing so, the findings highlight that while anal fisting among gay men may in fact engender shades of a sexually subversive practice by the way it radically (re)makes the material and erotic possibilities and connections of gay men’s bodies in exceptionally non-normative and perhaps Queer ways; it is, at the same time, also invested with, and reiterative of, discursive repertoires which actively recuperate heteronormative as well as heteromasculinist tropes and gendered power relations that, in some instances, appear femiphobic.

Assimilating Gender Subversion into Counter Hegemony: A Journey from Personal to Societal Disruption in a Fairy Tale

The fairy tales depict dissatisfied characters, whose individual potential and capabilities are limited under specific gender categories and societal hegemony. Thus, the characters, thus, rebel against the conventions, through gender subversion, and countering the hegemony forces. Thus, the paper is built on the theoretical frameworks of gender subversion, by Judith Butler (1990) and counter-hegemony by Antonio Gramsci (1971). The qualitative research thematically analyzed the character of Alex Bailey from, The Enchantress Returns by Chris Colfer (2013). The findings revealed that subverting gender gives confidence at the personal level, to counter-hegemonic forms at the social level. The findings also revealed that Alex was criticized, tormented, and discouraged for the subversion of the gender rules and norms, but, she encountered the prevailing hegemony and transformed at the societal level. The transformations are not necessarily massive, but, are sufficient enough to affect Alex and her actions.

Assimilation gaming: The reification of compulsory gender roles in RuPaul’s Drag Race

This article analyses the ‘Bunk Buddies’ mini-challenge on Season 8 of RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–present, USA: World of Wonder), during which the competitors identified the sexual positions of Andrew Christian models. In this episode (‘Shady Politics’ 2016), gaming and camera technologies work in tandem to repackage heteronormative models of gender and sexual identity for gay audiences. While the mini-challenge offers Andrew Christian models for visual pleasure of gay audiences, the game mechanics and camera angles reify masculine/feminine gender binaries in the way the preferred sexual positions between men are constructed, coding ‘tops’ as masculine and ‘bottoms’ as feminine. While stereotypes in the gay community also present similar understandings of compulsory gender roles, this depiction in RuPaul’s Drag Race, a groundbreaking television series celebrating gay lives and gender subversion through drag, is particularly troubling because it mythologizes a binary gender model that cites the heterosexual matrix and assimilates gay men into traditional male and female gender roles according to their preferred sexual positions. The ‘Bunk Buddies’ challenge thus suggests that sexual positions between men also have a literacy based on masculinity (penetrating) and femininity (receiving).